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I got my preorder of Unreal 2 yesterday. I started playing it after work, then on and off until now. I completed it with little effort. It was a gorgeous game in parts, and good fun, but two days?? I suppose I''m used to RPGs that last forever, but even FPSs like NOLF2 took me a week to finish. Shouldn''t game designers maintain the idea that a player may want more than 2 days (not fulltime) of play?

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I think it depends on the game; if it is very replayable, I don''t see the problem. For a linear, plot-driven game on the other hand, 2 days would be a bit disappointing.

A game I''m writing, still in it''s early design stages, will probably take only a couple of hours to complete at most - but you can play as one of three different races, and even with the same choice I don''t intend on having the same things happen each time you play it!

Actually, I would like to know what other people think about this concept. If it''s done well, would this diversion from the norm put you off, or appeal to you?

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depends how easily amused you are... myself, i usually get bored of games very quick. there are only a handful of games that i''ve actually complete, or perhaps still play... 2 of these include baldur''s gate 1 and 2... i just can''t get enough of them... then again, they aren''t fps''s. so if a game only takes a couple days to finish... fine by me, chances are i won''t pick it up again for awhile anyways.

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Maybe playing Unreal 2 just reminds you of playing through all the Half-Life single player mission.... realy, if *I* owned a secret government installation, I wouldn''t have included so many moving elevated platforms and acid-flooded rooms with lines of floating boxes to hop across in the building design -_-

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Yeah - but HL single player took me two weeks to finish. I agree with wojtos though I love the Baldur''s Gate series - BG2 took me over a month to finish, and I''m still working through IW2. It can be done in a FPS style though - with all its faults, Morrowind took forever to complete the main quest, and you can carry on doing other quests ad infinitum

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Some people want fast paced on-demand action. Others want long term plot and politics. Others are inbetween.

For me, about a month or two is the right longevity for a game. Long enough for it to dig itself into my dreams, short enough to allow for other games to come along.

I have about ten hours a week (on good weeks!) that I can devote to games. This means that if a game takes several hundred hours to finish, it''s eating up a huge chunk of my life, and unless it''s amazing, I''m going to resent it. But if it takes four hours.. I''m feeling gypped.

I recall "Loom" being disappointing. It was one of the first truly good puzzle-style games.. but I solved it in under three hours. For $40??? And it was the same game, regardless. On the other side, I found Wizards&Warriors to be waaaaaay tooooo ssslllooooowwww. I put in my time for about six months before finaly defeating it, and it felt like a hollow victory, for I had missed out on a number of other games -- but couldn''t put down the one I had put so much time into. (who can tell how close the ending is?)

But these were radical examples. On the other extremes I played Rama (a puzzle-based game, heavy on math) about five years back. Even though the ending was horrific (and timed!), the whole esperience was positive, even though it took my SO and I three months to get to the end. Because of the horrible ending we never finished it, but it was *still* fun. And one of my faves is Machiavelli, where a good "30 year" game takes 3-4 hours to play. It''s still on my hard drive, even though I have to take arcane steps to run it under current OSes.

Good games can be short but still have replayability... not meaning that longer games are necessarily better or worse!